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Comment by stanleydrew | Hacker News Reader

I would love to install and try this, but it wants access to my SMS messages and all my contacts. Why would a WiFi analyzer possibly need those two permissions? I've all but given up on rejecting apps that request my phone id since they all seem to do it now. But this seems excessive.

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The SMS messages stuff is so we can run analysis on number of SMS's you send and receive to display to you. We don't read any of your SMS's, we just count them. Unfortunately Android permissions don't let us differentiate the two. You can just not allow that permission though and the app will still work.

Last I checked, you can't cherry pick permissions when you install an app, its all or nothing.

Hmm, I'm the iPhone user of the company so I wouldn't know :). But according to nicholasjarnold below LBE Privacy Guard might work for that?

LBE Privacy Guard is only for rooted phones - i.e. most users won't have it.

You can absolutely cherry pick permissions (and everyone should). You just can't do it during installation and without a 3rd party helper app. Please look into rooting your device and installing LBE Privacy Guard.

CyanogenMod and ROMs with Pdroid do give you cherry-picked permissions, for what it's worth.

These are recent permissions for a new feature which allow you to track your plan usage (minutes/sms/data etc) within the app. We wrote details about why we needed these on our blog: http://opensignal.com/blog/2012/11/29/new-permissions-in-ver....

I recommend you split your app into two. You can make the main download with the harmless permissions, and then a secondary download with all the extra gunk.

A good example of this is Elixir 2 which has various add-ons. There are several ways of doing it depending on how deep you need the integration to be. And it provides a way to add optional future functionality.

If you usw a sharedUserId all your apps have all the permissions combined. Although I am not sure that is a good thing to do. It is deceiving.

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